RealFlow blog: Tips, Technics and Scripting.

Silly tips!! – Part I

Here you go some newbie tips I had in the treasure trove, remember them is never a bad idea.

Relaxing fluids:

If you need to a pool of fluid you always need to relax the fluid to get a initial state, you can simulate during a lot of frames.

To accelerate this process you can use a KSpeed daemon activating the limit&keep option, I use to animate the Simulation attribute in the first frame….

… and activate the Lock function in the time line, depending on the scene set up it´ll be needed increase or decrease the number of frames for the countdown.

Breaking patterns:

Usually emitters in RealFlow have a pattern in the emission, the slices. To avoid them you could use several methods:

Use the H/V random

Adding some randomness in the emission, you could do this with a simple expression in the speed attribute4.5+rnd(1), 4.5 is the main speed.

You can use a Noise daemon linked to the emitter and bounded to the space icon.

Using droppers, a dropper is a basic geometry to make the fluid collide before to drop down, you can make it simple with planes or modelling it in a 3d platform so you could get nice and realistic patterns.

Simulation in vacuum:

Remember RealFlow is not in essence a Computational Fluid Dynamics software (CFD) and works always in vacuum, so if you would need to simulate with accuracy you will need to add a second fluid -air- interacting with the main fluid, but this could be against the simulation times.

Sticky Attribute:

It is really important the normals aim to the collision side in order to get correct results, the sticky attribute is a force applied to the colliding particle and is inverse to the geometry normal.